Quotes of the day

posted at 8:01 pm on April 6, 2014 by Allahpundit

Can you hear the piteous weeping? The wronged tears? Those poor bigots are under attack. Those who are prejudiced against gay people are having their constitutional right to say so trampled. It’s a terrible injustice: you can’t believe that gay people are lesser without some pesky homosexual objecting and “bullying” you into believing that equality under the law is a venerable aim…

This conflation of the bully-turned-to-victim neatly clouds the admirable baseline mainstream America is edging towards: the “shame” axis around homosexuality has positively shifted from those who are gay to those who are anti-gay.

***

App developers Hampton and Michael Catlin, a gay couple, distanced themselves from Mozilla after Eich’s hiring, a move that helped bring Eich’s support of Prop. 8 to light.

“This really was a personal statement of boycott, and it seems to be getting carried as if we are organizing a boycott or that we think Mozilla is evil or that we think Brendan Eich is the devil. None of those things are true,” Hampton Catlin tells Beta News, which broke the story. “We just were hurt as developers who were committing our time and energy to their platform, that they would go pick someone with an unresolved anti-same-sex-marriage controversy. If he had apologized years ago, this would be a non-issue.”

***

The view that Eich was just expressing his opposition to marriage equality, a common stance at the time, strikes me as naive. Because Prop 8 is now dead, and because its passage was largely overshadowed by President Barack Obama’s election victory, it’s easy to forget the vicious tactics of the pro-Prop 8 campaign. Or, I should say, it’s easy to forget them if you’re not gay—because almost every gay person I know remembers the passage of Prop 8 as the most traumatic and degrading anti-gay event in recent American history…

This message of belittlement cut across pretty much every pro-Prop 8 ad—ads that ran incessantly in the state for months. The campaign’s strategy was to debase gay families as deviant and unhealthy while insinuating that gay people are engaged in a full-scale campaign to convert children to their cause. This strategy worked. And it worked because wealthy donors like Brendan Eich flooded the campaign with the money it needed to run ads like the ones above. Eich wasn’t just a casual opponent of marriage equality. He was a major contributor to the most vitriolic anti-gay campaign in American history, one that set the standard of homophobic propaganda that continues to this day. When we talk about Eich’s anti-gay stance, we aren’t just talking about abstract beliefs. We’re talking about concrete actions that harmed thousands of gay families and informed innumerable gay Americans that they were sinful, corrupted predators.

***

Oddly, however, I don’t see defenders of Eich also criticizing the Boy Scouts for excluding gay men because the organization disagrees with their conduct and beliefs. Nor do I even see conservatives taking Mozilla’s rights as a private corporation seriously—a predictable hypocrisy made especially obnoxious in light of last week’s widespread right-wing praise of the corporate plaintiff’s claim in Hobby Lobby. This is the conservative double standard in the realm of corporate rights: When the corporation supports a right-wing pet project—say, denying women reproductive care—conservatives pen encomia to the First Amendment’s corporate protections. But when a corporation dares to support a progressive cause like gay rights, conservatives cry foul at its alleged censorship of individual views.

It’s really no surprise, of course, that the right wing views Mozilla’s objections to Eich’s anti-gay activities as censorship and Hobby Lobby’s objection to birth control as religious liberty. We’ve known all along that conservatives’ quiver of defenses for corporate rights have only been employed to further its own agenda. The right wing’s backlash over Mozilla’s move only further proves that opportunism, rather than principled dissent, drives its frantic charge for full corporate personhood. Keep that in mind as the conservative outrage machine takes aim at Mozilla for daring to exclude a man whose values and conduct it finds unacceptable.

***

I get it. Brendan Eich is a bad man. So, don’t play golf with him, and don’t have a beer with him. You can even leave him off the invitation list for your birthday party. But, don’t hold all of Mozilla, and all of its employees, and the entire ecosystem of third-party developers who rely on the Firefox Web browser accountable just because you disagree with the views of one person who works at the company—even if he is the CEO.

Becker mentioned what she called a rebranding of the [gay-marriage] movement over the last five years, with two important components. First, gay marriage was framed in terms of family values. Second, advocates didn’t shame opponents and instead made sympathetic public acknowledgment of the journey that many Americans needed to complete in order to be comfortable with marriage equality.

There was no such acknowledgment from Mozilla employees and others who took to Twitter to condemn Eich and call for his head. Writing about that wrath in his blog, The Dish, Andrew Sullivan said that it disgusted him, “as it should disgust anyone interested in a tolerant and diverse society.” A leading supporter of gay marriage, Sullivan warned other supporters not to practice “a fanaticism more like the religious right than anyone else.”

I can’t get quite as worked up as he did. For one thing, prominent gay rights groups weren’t part of the Mozilla fray. For another, Mozilla isn’t the first company to make leadership decisions (or reconsiderations) with an eye toward the boss’s cultural mind-meld with the people below him or her. And if you believe that to deny a class of people the right to marry is to deem them less worthy, it’s indeed difficult to chalk up opposition to marriage equality as just another difference of opinion.

Some of the very same people who have jumped up and down with delight as Brandon Eich lost his job will doubtless be backing Hillary Clinton for president in 2016 if she runs. The “Ready for Hillary” ranks are crowded with gay men – and good for them. But it’s worth considering some consistency here. If it is unconscionable to support a company whose CEO once donated to the cause against marriage equality, why is it not unconscionable to support a candidate who opposed marriage equality as recently as 2008, and who was an integral part of an administration that embraced the Defense Of Marriage Act, signed into law by Bill Clinton? How do you weigh the relative impact of a president strongly backing DOMA – even running ads touting his support for it in the South – and an executive who spent $1000 for an anti-marriage equality Proposition?

Hillary Clinton only declared her support for marriage equality in 2013. Before that, she opposed it. In 2000, she said that marriage “has a historic, religious and moral context that goes back to the beginning of time. And I think a marriage has always been between a man and a woman.” Was she then a bigot? On what conceivable grounds can the Democratic party support a candidate who until only a year ago was, according to the latest orthodoxy, the equivalent of a segregationist, and whose administration enacted more anti-gay laws and measures than any in American history?

There is a difference, of course, between Brendan Eich and Hillary Clinton. Eich has truly spoken of the pain he once caused and owned up to it[.]

***

Yes, the culture war has been raging for a long time, except people didn’t notice it because it seemed to take place on the edges or in fringe settings. All the Eich affair did was make it obvious.

Ironically many people, even in the homosexual community, don’t want this culture war and are dismayed by the Eich witchunt. They don’t want it not only because … but I’ll get to that in a moment … especially since the Eich affair is not about gay marriage, except incidentally, any more than the Summers affair was about racism or feminism; or that Steyn’s suit has anything to do with warmism or denialism or the gunowners map was about school safety; or still less that the 2013 IRS persecution of Tea Party groups was to do with Citizen’s United.

The removal of Eich is about fascism. It’s about one group of people forcing everyone else to bow to their hat on a pole; it s about book burning, compelling obeisance to, as Jame Surowiecki put it, “a universal ideology” in a manner so bald that even those who might gain politically in the short term from it are horrified by its crudity.

Perceptive gays understand now, if they hadn’t noticed before, that a whole mechanism now exists for persecuting people whose views are deemed unacceptable. Today it is directed against Eich; once it was directed against Summers; on other occasions it was employed against Clarence Thomas. But sooner or later, probably sooner, they understand it will be directed against them — or us — or someone. And if it can get a corporate CEO who is widely regarded as the father of Javascript it can get pretty darned anyone.

***

Welcome to the Liberal Gulag.

That term may be perverse, but it is not an exaggeration. Mr. Weinstein specifically called for political activists, ranging from commentators to think-tank researchers, to be locked in cages as punishment for their political beliefs. “Those denialists should face jail,” he wrote. “You still can’t” — banality alert! — “yell ‘fire’ in a crowded theater. You shouldn’t be able to yell ‘balderdash’ at 10,883 scientific journal articles a year.” “Balderdash” — a felony. At the risk of being repetitious, let’s dwell on that for a minute: The Left is calling on people to be prosecuted for speaking their minds regarding their beliefs on an important public-policy question that is, as a political matter, the subject of hot dispute. That is the stuff of Soviet repression…

“They think that to be a Fascist you must have some sort of shirt uniform, must drill and goose-step, must have a demonstrative salute, must hate the Jews, and believe in dictatorship,” John T. Flynn wrote many years ago. Mr. Flynn was an America First founder who had a high-profile falling out with the editors of this magazine back in 1955, but he offered some fruitful insights: “Fascism is not the result of dictatorship. . . . Dictatorship is the product of Fascism.” Mr. Flynn probably would not be surprised to see the Left coming around — again — on hating Jews, even if Occupy rituals have replaced the traditional pseudo-Roman salute. Their shirts come in many colors, but their true colors never change: an ugly, ignorant, power-hungry mob utterly committed to crushing dissent by any means it can. Mr. Weinstein and his ilk want to put us in camps, and crass totalitarians of similar stripe may be found everywhere from the executive suites at Mozilla to the halls of power at the IRS. It’s a shameful spectacle, and an unworthy one.

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These people, all ‘less than 2% of them’ who like to use foreign tools to penetrate each other appear to be running the country and are running the streets like rabid dogs trying to find the next victim who don’t share in their deviate views.

Nobody has to be anything, I suppose. But if you’re going to promote something to a bunch of country music fans, you’d think you’d use a country music person. And who was that other presenter guy? Probably somebody famous I’ve never heard of.

Ww we live under a fascist/”liberal” dictatorship where you will not yet be sent to a concentration camp for disagreeing with the regime but you will not get a decent jobs; you will not get a decent education and you will never be able to express an opinion or disagree with the American Ministry of Propaganda. Stop your children from joining the American federal forces and let the rich “liberals” send their own children off to their foreign wars; stop supporting the government schools which are run by the ministry of propaganda; stop participating in civic life, absolutely refuse to serve on a jury in the corrupt legal system, or try to undermine it; boycott the TV industry and the Entertainment industry which are controlled again by the Ministry of Truth; teach your children the truth about the corrupt amoral culture and government that the modern Americans have inflicted on the world.

At the turn of the century he observed most of the world moving away from statist dirigisme, toward free-market democracy — liberalisme in the French political lexicon — as the surest formula for prosperity. To his inventory of retreats from statism I would add how President Clinton, seeing his party trounced in midterm elections after he attempted to nationalize the heal-care industry, shifted expediently to the center on social and budgetary issues, gaining popularity as a result.

Noticed H.R.Clinton running around the last couple of weeks bemoaning how ‘partisanship is moving us backward’… and in her estimation ‘ we need to be able to reach agreement’.

Clinton’s trying to go with what they know… ‘triangulation’…and blaming the GOP for any discord…or opposition… along the way.

B9 pointed out today that to elect H.R. Clinton would be to say we want another president that congress would be afraid to keep in check… just like Obama… since she’d come from yet another ‘minority’…and congress has proven themselves to be gutless and willing to allow Obama any excess or abuse of his power…even breaking the law… 38 times alone by changing ObamaCare by his will alone… without benefit of congress… and they’d be the same gutless and impotent body with any minority who would point and shriek ‘racist’ or ‘misogynist’ or ‘chauvinist’, etc.

B9 pointed out today that to elect H.R. Clinton would be to say we want another president that congress would be afraid to keep in check… just like Obama… since she’d come from yet another ‘minority’…and congress has proven themselves to be gutless and willing to allow Obama any excess or abuse of his power…even breaking the law… 38 times alone by changing ObamaCare by his will alone… without benefit of congress… and they’d be the same gutless and impotent body with any minority who would point and shriek ‘racist’ or ‘misogynist’ or ‘chauvinist’, etc.

So I think we need to get beyond the harsh political rhetoric to a better place. The great number of people who come to this country come because they have no opportunities in other places. They may love their country, but they come here because they want to provide for their families. And they can make a contribution to our country if we actually organized ourselves in a better way.”

Speaking of which, how come neither party speaks aggressively of exporting the ideas that make us who we are and what we are–you know, life liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? The rule of law (don’t laugh) and free markets?

Think about it–we talk endlessly about how the Mexicans come here, but then never ask Why don’t they feel like they can stay at home and prosper? Could it be that we would have to point out that other countries are failures in certain ways? Is that too judgmental for our ultra sensitive politicians to say for fear of being labeled too “proAmerican” or some other nonsense?

Could it be that we would have to point out that other countries are failures in certain ways? Is that too judgmental for our ultra sensitive politicians to say for fear of being labeled too “proAmerican” or some other nonsense?

Doc Holliday on April 6, 2014 at 11:35 PM

You make too much sense, Doc.

On this paragraph – to talk about others, negatively is being rubeish. They are just another culture, all of them. Get with the eruditin’. Plus, only hicks like us are patriotic. It’s soooo passé.

On more serious note – the world hates our wishing to be a hegemony. To hell with the world. Just see Salahuddin, here, and further up, for what they want the US to become.

To Hades with Jeb and Rubio, and all like them, from both sides. They sell the kids.

Speaking of which, how come neither party speaks aggressively of exporting the ideas that make us who we are and what we are–you know, life liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? The rule of law (don’t laugh) and free markets?

Think about it–we talk endlessly about how the Mexicans come here, but then never ask Why don’t they feel like they can stay at home and prosper? Could it be that we would have to point out that other countries are failures in certain ways? Is that too judgmental for our ultra sensitive politicians to say for fear of being labeled too “proAmerican” or some other nonsense?

Doc Holliday on April 6, 2014 at 11:35 PM

I was just contemplating this very thing! Unfortunately, I could not even begin to articulate it like this. Glad you could!

Mexico has one of the world’s largest economies, it is the tenth largest oil producer in the world, the largest silver producer in the world and is considered both a regional power and middle power.[15][16][17][18] In addition, Mexico was the first Latin American member of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development OECD (since 1994), and considered an upper-middle income country by the World Bank.[19] Mexico is considered a newly industrialized country[20][21][22][23] and an emerging power.[24] It has the fourteenth largest nominal GDP and the tenth largest GDP by purchasing power parity. The economy is strongly linked to those of its North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) partners, especially the United States of America.[25][26] Mexico ranks sixth in the world and first in the Americas by number of UNESCO World Heritage Sites with 32,[27][28][29] and in 2010 was the tenth most visited country in the world with 22.5 million international arrivals per year.[30] According to Goldman Sachs, by 2050 Mexico is expected to become the world’s fifth largest economy.[31] PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) estimated in January 2013 that by 2050 Mexico could be the world’s seventh largest economy.[32] Mexico has membership in prominent institutions such as the UN, the WTO, the G20 and the Uniting for Consensus.

Poor, poor, Mexico… who has systematically exported their poor and uneducated to the United States.

She’s also suffering from edema. You can see the swelling even under the legs of the pantsuits. Her hands are even puffy…and those dark circles under her eyes… and the greenish tinge under the jaw line.

I have driven through Mexico about 7 years ago, from north to South. It is predominately a third world police state where the cops of all levels all try and extract bribes from you for imaginary “paperwork problems”. There are pockets of prosperity, but there is enormous corruption. The question is can the prosperity outrun the corruption, or will it be consumed and destroyed by it? People everywhere want to prosper, but it is hard when the local powers that be view you as an easy mark for extortion when you begin to show some signs of success….

I have been spending the week with my childrend and grandchildren in VA, including my 2.5 week old grandson. I wish I could share some of that with you guys. It has been wonderful.

KCB on April 6, 2014 at 11:55 PM

That’s what life is all about! We celebrated my Aunt and Uncle’s 50th wedding anniversary recently, and had a big party. It was like a family gathering. It was wonderful getting everyone together even if for just a few hours.

1. SparkPlug’s phone was filled with sawdust, and now that it’s fixed, his mood is a lot less p!ssy. So everyone can relax. It wasn’t as bad as following me around all day b!tching about my “a sandwich could beat Obama” comment after the election, but damn — glad it’s over.

2. Ken’s around.

3. Most importantly, Sophie’s reading Disinformation by Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa, which she has marked as “must read,” and Our Mutual Friend. She doesn’t read much fiction, so Our Mutual Friend is a little out of character. I’m reading Last Exit to Utopia again so that she and I can spend the evening reading together — though I keep getting distracted by you people.

4. Cats don’t appreciate being sprayed with perfume.

5. Schad’s waxing wise — lol. :)

. . . the rest is probably evidenced within scrolling distance, so I’ll leave off there.

O!

6. b9 snorted, like, for real;

7. Making out with an Orange chick is now called “snacking on Cheetos.”

She’s also suffering from edema. You can see the swelling even under the legs of the pantsuits. Her hands are even puffy…and those dark circles under her eyes… and the greenish tinge under the jaw line.

thatsafactjack on April 6, 2014 at 11:53 PM

Yeah, could be a heart issue, or even renal failure. Something’s not right. contrast her, to Ronald Reagan, who was about the same age–the Gipper looked hale and hearty. She looks like rough.

Poor, poor, Mexico… who has systematically exported their poor and uneducated to the United States.

thatsafactjack on April 6, 2014 at 11:50 PM

While their rich and otherwise well off live in luxury, with lots of staff, and do NADA to advance their society, in all this time. Plus, the land is so incredibly rich and advantageously situated. They can take care of themselves. The US is not the welfare for the world.

To Hell with all the looters/moochers, from both sides. I hate the Rs more than the Ds, lately. It took some doing, but they achieved the status.

She’s also suffering from edema. You can see the swelling even under the legs of the pantsuits. Her hands are even puffy…and those dark circles under her eyes… and the greenish tinge under the jaw line.

Haven’t posted in a while but, I check in everyday. Anyways, I found an article that should be of help to people trying to find a suitable replacement for Firefox.

It was written about 18 months ago but, it’s pretty informative. The gist of it is that you should pick your browser based on the abilities of your PC or laptop. If you have a powerful PC with lots of RAM, then you probably want something like Chrome or Opera. If your PC is older and slower, then you don’t want a browser packed full of features like Firefox or Explorer. You might wanna try Midori or SlimBoat.

The downside of using non mainstream browsers? Not a lot of people use it. So, the knowledge base isn’t too big and it is likely to stay that way. Still, if you don’t care about features and extensions, give it a try.

Exactly why the young people coming to this nation for work need to stay home and fight for their own nation and clean it up.

The United States didn’t become the nation it is because when things got tough everyone ran out and imposed on their neighbors. Our antecedents sweated, sacrificed, and toiled to make this nation what it is today.

Further, given that a huge portion of the next generation of Mexico, those who will be needed to care for their elders and build the schools, roads, cities, etc., are up here, what is to become of an aging population in Mexico? Mexico’s future has been exported.

Mexico’s entire population is about 110million. We’ve got at least 12 million of them here, and they have a median age of 27 years.

Mexico enjoys an unemployment level of just 5.4%. When was the last time ours was that low?

Mexico has a poverty rate of about 18%.. and it’s declining. As a matter of fact, the northern states have a lower poverty rate, and it rises in the southern states… where the Native American population is the densest. Ours is about 15% and it’s rising.

Finally, Mexico is a sovereign nation, it is not the responsibility of this nation to provide for Mexico or to settle their internal problems for them.

Ok I promised everyone another rant so here goes, as it is now after 10pm here (Alabama) so I am officially off work–HOO YA!
Meanwhile, back at the Rant…
Totally off topic, too, so even better…
If you or your loved ones get into the hospital, God forbid, please do not say things like “Where have you been, Doc, we’ve been waiting all day!” or some other such statement. I assure you we get to you just as soon as we can, but we operate on the triage system–the sickest go first. The French military invented this system for treating the wounded, and we still use it today. If I or someone like me comes to see you later than you would like, it is because someone else in the hospital is SICKER THAN YOU.

But don’t worry. Someday it will be your turn to be that sick, and I, or someone like me, will stop the world for you.